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Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Interesting Wild West Facts - Susan Horsnell

Hi EveryoneGetting excited. It is just 10 days before hubby and I visit Texas. Cannot wait to see the historical sites around the state. My good friend Caroline Clemmons will be hosting us for a few days in Dallas/Fort Worth and I hear she has some interesting things planned. It will be our first visit to mainland USA and I'm very sure it won't be our last. For my post this week I thought I would share some interesting facts on the "Wild West" of years past.

Judge Roy Bean

Judge Roy Bean once killed a Mexican official in a
dispute over a girl in California. A friend of the Mexican official
hanged Bean; but, before he died, he was cut down by the contested
damsel. Ever after, Bean was unable to turn his head due to the injury.

The first gold strike in the Old West was made by Jose Ortiz in 1832 south of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in what would quickly become the boom
town of Delores.

Billy the Kid was born in New York City on September 17, 1859.

Established in 1827, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas is the oldest military post in continuous
operation west of the Mississippi River.

The oldest human skeleton ever found in the Western
Hemisphere was discovered in 1953 near Midland, Texas. It was first believed that the skeleton, the remains of
a 30-year-old woman, was 10,000 years old. However, the latest estimates are
that it is much older.

The term "red light district" came from the Red
Light Bordello in Dodge City, Kansas. The front door of the
building was made of red glass and produced a red glow to the outside world
when lit at night. The name carried over to refer to the town's brothel
district.

Clay Allison was described in a physician’s
report as maniacal” with a personality where "emotional or physical
excitement produces paroxysmal of a mixed character.”

Estimates of how many people lived in North America before
the arrival of the European explorers vary from 8.4 million to 112 million.
This population was divided into about 240 tribal groupings speaking an
estimated 300 different languages.

Buffalo,which were strewn across the Great Plains after the mass buffalo hunts of
1870-1883, were bought by Eastern firms for the production of fertilizer and
bone china. "Bone pickers” earned eight dollars a ton for the bones.

Around 1541, the present state of Texas was called Tejas, a Spanish version of the Caddo
word meaning "allies."

Wyatt Earp

Wyatt Earp was indicted for horse theft in Van Buren, Arkansas on
May 8, 1871. He escaped trial by jumping bail and fleeing to Kansas.

Rumor has it that the tradition of spreading sawdust on the
floors of bars and saloons started
in Deadwood, South Dakota due to the amount of gold dust that would
fall on the floor. The sawdust was used to hide the fallen gold dust and was
swept up at the end of the night.

After serving more than twenty years in prison, Cole Younger got a job selling tombstones,
worked for a while in a Wild West show with Frank James and died quietly in 1916 in Lee’s
Summit, Missouri, where he was known as an elderly
churchgoer.

Wyatt Earp was neither the town marshal or
the sheriff in Tombstone, Arizona at the time of the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral. His brother Virgil was the town marshal,
who had temporarily deputized Wyatt, Morgan and Doc Holliday prior to the gunfight.

The Oregon Trail from Independence, Missouri to Fort Vancouver, Washington measured
2,020 miles. An estimated 350,000 emigrants took the trail but one out of seventeen would
not survive the trip. The most common cause of death was cholera.

Harry Longabaugh became known as
"the Sundance Kid" because he served a jail term for
horse stealing in Sundance, Wyoming.

The Sundance Kid

Mike Fink was a keel boatman along the Ohio
and Mississippi Rivers and an expert marksman.
However, he loved his drink and was a known brawler. One of his favorite games
was to shoot a mug of brew from the top of some fellow's head. However, on one
night in 1823, he had drank so much that it didn't matter how good were his
shooting skills. This time he missed and killed the guy who was wearing the mug
on his head. In no time, the dead man's friends retaliated by killing Fink. For
whatever reasons, his legend was being told for decades along with the likes of
Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill.

Texas was the most active gunfighting state, with some 160 shoot-outs
from the 1850's through the 1890's.

The Colt Peacemaker, the weapon that became known as
"the gun that won the West” was a .45-caliber manufactured by Colt’s Fire
Arms Manufacturing Company in Hartford, Connecticut in 1873. At the time it
sold for $17.00.

Samuel Clemens, struck by silver fever, tried his hand at
prospecting in the town of Unionville, Nevada in 1862. Having more luck in trading mining claims
than actually producing silver, he wound up leaving the area. A short time
latter Clemens, changes his name to Mark Twain and becomes one of the greatest
writers of American Literature.

On December 21, 1876, Clay Allison shot and killed Deputy Sheriff
Charles Faber at the Olympic Dance Hall in Las Animas, Colorado. If it weren’t for Allison purposely stomping on the feet of
other dancers, the law probably would never have been called.

The Infamous Dalton Gang only operated for one year and five months, beginning with
a train robbery in Wharton, Oklahoma on May 9, 1891 and ending at the shootout at
Coffeyville, Kansason October 5, 1892.

Though the term "stick 'em up" is widely used in
Western films, it wasn't actually coined until the 1930's.

I hope you have enjoyed reading about some of the Wild Wests' history.

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